


Burdens Shared

by Lazy8



Series: Forging Connections [3]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon - Comics, F/M, Friends to Lovers, bodyguard crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-04-26 11:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5002690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lazy8/pseuds/Lazy8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Suki had seen him first as an enemy, then as an ally. For the first time in her life, though, she's beginning to see him as something more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burdens Shared

Suki honestly couldn't have said when it started. All she knew was that somewhere along the line, disdain and anger had turned to camaraderie and eventually friendship, and then to a jolt that shot through her gut every time she saw him, and she hadn't even noticed.

When she thought about it, however, she realized that it wasn't until after she had signed on as Zuko's bodyguard that she had truly started to see him as a _person_ , someone like her with needs and wants, shouldering a burden that was far too heavy for any one person to bear alone, and that she wanted to help him carry it.

" _Six?_ " Suki stared in disbelief when Ty Lee told her how many assassination attempts Zuko had survived in the first year of his reign alone. "He wasn't hurt, was he?"

"No, he's fine." She had long ago gotten used to Ty Lee speaking to her with her body contorted into some sort of configuration that Suki found painful just to look at. "But Mai thinks he will get hurt if he has to keep fighting them off himself." She flipped back upright, her normally cheerful face taking on a more serious expression. "You'll help him, right?"

"Of course. I'll ask around and see if any of the other Kyoshi Warriors are willing as well." Ty Lee's brilliant smile was reward enough for anything—Suki didn't know how they'd become such good friends in the short time they'd known each other, but now it was nearly impossible to imagine life without her—and Suki gave a faint smile of her own as she watched the other girl backflip away.

The smile fell from her face, however, as her thoughts drifted back to the reason for Mai's request. _Six…_ She'd known from the beginning that Zuko had survived plenty of hardships—one look at his face was enough to tell her that—but the thought that he was suffering still more in what should have been a time of peace troubled her far more than it would have before she'd known him.

It was harder still to actually see him, and watch his decline from the person she'd known in the war. Zuko might not have been hurt, but the repeated attacks were taking their toll: it was clear from one look that he'd barely been sleeping at all, and having competent guards at his door didn't seem to help him much in that regard.

Suki took her job seriously. When she guarded a person, it was with the understanding that his life was—almost literally—in her hands. Therefore, when he walked off alone in the middle of the night, dismissing her offer of an escort, even though she knew full well that Zuko could take care of himself while awake, Suki followed. When she saw where he was going, however…

 _This isn't something I can help him with_ , she realized as she leaned up against the prison wall, torn, knowing that something was terribly wrong but unable to offer any sort of solution. They'd fought together at the Boiling Rock, slept under the same roof, watched one stupid play, and exchanged a few words concerning her village and the burning down thereof, but that marked the extent of their acquaintance. During the war, Suki hadn't been with the group long enough to actually get to know him, and after… well, after, they had all gone their separate ways. She didn't know why Zuko was meeting with Ozai, but she did know that it wasn't a topic he'd be willing to discuss with a mere bodyguard. He needed to hear it from someone closer to him—given the topic at hand Aang was out of the question, and Iroh was in Ba Sing Se, which only left one possibility…

It didn't go the way that she'd planned. Instead of Mai finding out what was wrong as Suki had hoped, the conversation ended in their breakup, and Suki felt guilt churn in the pit of her stomach as she watched Mai walk away. She'd intended to help him, and instead had ended up piling one more burden on top of everything else…

"I'm so sorry!" Suki was, she realized, on her hands and knees in front of him—not groveling before the Fire Lord, but begging forgiveness from a friend. Upon seeing her in that position, she heard his breath hitch, and even as she explained herself he was reaching down to pull her to her feet.

Then, it slipped out: "We're really worried about you— _I'm_ really worried about you."

That conversation, however, was cut short, and Suki found herself in the unenviable position of having to assemble Team Avatar once more because it looked like Zuko was about to do something that could put an end to every one of his hard-forged friendships—or, even worse, start another war.

"He seemed so… lonely," she admitted to Sokka even as they prepared to go to battle against him.

It was true, she realized—Aang, Katara, and Sokka had never parted since the end of the war. Toph had her students. Suki had Ty Lee and the other Kyoshi Warriors. Zuko… he had no one. Ruling a country alone with his friends scattered to the four winds, his only family worth speaking of a continent away, and going by what Mai had said he'd been distancing himself from her as well… no wonder he was starting to crumble.

Thankfully, it didn't come to what they'd all feared. Aang found a peaceful solution just like he always did, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief as the armies backed down, only for Zuko to collapse on the battlefield—not from injury, but from exhaustion.

"I'm taking him to the Jasmine Dragon," Aang called down to them as he hefted the unconscious Fire Lord into Appa's saddle; Katara leaped in after him, her healing water already out. "Can you guys hold down the fort here until we get back?"

"Don't worry about us, Aang." Sokka stepped forward; the rest of them gathered around him in a show of solidarity. "We've got you covered."

The next they heard from Aang, it was that Zuko would be staying in the Earth Kingdom for a while longer—first to recover, then to resume negotiations with Earth King Kuei. Suki, however, would be returning to the Fire Nation.

"It'll be a show of good faith," Aang explained. "It's a whole new world, and if Earth Kingdom natives are going to work in the Fire Nation, so much the better. Besides," he added in a more serious tone, "the Fire Nation's bound to be in an uproar with its leader gone. I need someone there I know I can trust."

Suki agreed readily enough; his logic was sound, and besides Zuko would hardly need a bodyguard with the Avatar by his side. Her presence at the negotiations would have been redundant. Still, as she boarded the ship that would take her back to the Fire Nation, Suki couldn't help but wonder how long it would be before Zuko returned as well—they hadn't had much of a chance to be friends during the war, and Suki was seeing the omission more and more as a missed opportunity.

Nevertheless, when he returned Suki was taken off-guard by how _happy_ she was to see him back. True, it had been several long weeks of boredom punctuated by the occasional mission to flush out Ozai loyalists, but Zuko's return only meant that time spent consulting with Mai or exchanging letters with Aang would be replaced by nights spent standing in front of a door—hardly the pinnacle of excitement.

Suki fell into her new routine with the comfort of old habit. Her nights were spent standing guard, her off-days and free time training with Ty Lee—though she had reached the stage where she was able to consistently strike all of the right pressure points, she still had to consciously think about what she was doing, and she knew that if she ever had to use chi-blocking in a combat situation, her opponent wasn't going to politely stand still while she figured out where to hit him.

"Suki? Can I talk to you?"

Her concentration was broken, and she accidentally hit the guard who'd volunteered to be today's practice dummy on his funny bone rather than the intended pressure point. "I am so sorry!" she apologized as he winced and grasped his arm. "Are you okay?"

"Nothing worse than a bruise." He rubbed his arm. "Still, I think I've about reached my limit for today." He grinned. "You pack quite a punch for a girl your size." With a nod to her and a brief bow to Zuko, he turned around and left.

"Um… sorry about that." Even as Zuko apologized, however, Suki felt blood rise to her face at the thought that he'd seen her make such a bad slip-up, and was glad that she'd put on her face paint before training today. "Are you free now?"

"Yes, of course." A nervous jolt shot through her midsection, however, as she followed him from the training grounds, wondering what he could possibly want to discuss with her.

It was a few minutes of walking before he decided to share what was on his mind. "I've been away from the Fire Nation for a long time," he started. "Well, I guess you already knew that, since you were sort of there… right." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "What I'm trying to say is that in the past four years, I've spent more time away than I have at home, and even when I am here I seem to have lost touch with my own people. I know that you and the other Kyoshi Warriors did a lot of work both with my advisers and with the people over the last few weeks. The truth is, I need…" He took a deep breath. "I need your help."

In response, she stared. _He_ was asking _her_ for help? "I'll do what I can," was her tentative reply.

The first time they met in his study, they both started.

"I'd almost forgotten how you looked without all the makeup," he admitted.

"I could say the same thing about you and your crown," she shot back without missing a beat. They exchanged a smile.

"Tea?" Zuko lifted the steaming pot in the middle of the table.

"Just like old times." Suki held out her cup.

Months passed, and the meetings became another part of her routine. Ty Lee dragged her to festivals and circuses on their off-days. Suki learned to eat the spicy Fire Nation food without reaching for her water every other bite. She and Sokka ended it due to the difficulty of maintaining such a long-distance relationship, but continued to exchange letters that got increasingly less awkward as time went on. One by one, the other warriors got homesick and left. Their positions were not left vacant, though, as Suki now had a class full of potential replacements—local girls and women who'd wanted to learn self-defense, not to mention a handful of guards.

"The job pays well," she informed Giya when the younger girl stayed behind after class to make a stammering inquiry, "not to mention it comes with a lot of prestige—if you can stand the boredom, that is."

The next day, she learned that a handful of her students had signed on to the entry program for the Fire Lord's elite guards, and Suki smiled as she helped them put on their makeup for the first time.

"So are you going to go back to Kyoshi Island now?"

Ty Lee looked uncharacteristically morose as she asked it, and Suki started as she realized it was a question she hadn't even thought about. "Why are you asking?" she responded carefully.

"Well… everyone else has." Ty Lee slumped where she sat, and the fact that she was _sitting_ like a normal person, not bent over backwards or standing on her hands, told Suki that she was feeling far more down than she'd been letting on, and Suki felt a pang of guilt that she hadn't noticed before. "I've never had so many friends before, but… this is my home. I don't know what I'm going to do after you leave," she confessed.

When she'd first crossed the sea to protect both the Fire Lord and their fragile peace, it had been with the understanding that the arrangement was a temporary one, and that she'd eventually go back. For the first time since she'd come here, however, Suki questioned whether she really wanted to.

Kyoshi Island was her home. It was the place where she knew everyone, and everyone knew her name. It was the place where she'd been born, where she'd first curled her clumsy eight-year-old fingers around the handle of a dulled fan. When the Avatar had arrived, however, bringing the Fire Prince with him, her eyes had been forced open and she'd realized the extent to which they'd wrapped themselves up in an isolating fog. Closing their eyes and ears to the outside world would not save them from conflict—it would only make them more vulnerable when the danger inevitably came to their door. Those had been real soldiers they'd faced, not a group of teenagers playing dress-up, and if not for the heroism of the Avatar they'd have lost far more than a few houses. What had made it even worse was the thought that so many others _had_ lost more.

When she'd left, she had discovered how _big_ the outside world was, and how limited her own experience was by comparison. There would always be people who needed help. There would always be someone better than her—the admission had stung, especially when she'd been sitting in a Fire Nation jail cell—but the flip side of that was that there would always be something new to learn. If she were to go back now, Suki knew, her tiny island would seem so small, so… stifling. Her friends were there, her _family_ was there—but if there was anything the Hundred Year War had taught her, it was that she needed more room to grow than Kyoshi Island could give her.

She was trying to work out some of these conflicted feelings on the training grounds—first running through the comfortable routine of the earliest forms she'd learned, then practicing her chi blocking on a straw dummy—when the sound of someone clearing his throat behind her drew her attention away from her practice. "Mind if I join you?"

She turned. Zuko—it still felt weird to her to think of him as the Fire Lord—had exchanged his elaborate robes for the simple traveling outfit he'd worn when they'd been on the run with Aang, and his shaggy hair was loose and falling into his eyes. "Well, this is your property." She gestured to the training grounds, which were mostly empty at this time of day. "I hardly think you need my permission."

"Yeah, but… it still seems rude not to ask. Ozai definitely wouldn't have," he added after a second's hesitation.

"Be my guest." Suki returned to punching the dummy as Zuko took a firebending stance.

By the time she had finished her routine, he was well into the swing of his, and Suki stopped to watch as she packed up her fans. Zuko was practicing an elegant, flowing form that looked like no firebending she'd ever seen before, his feet moving fluidly from one stance to the next until they had carried him in a half-circle that ended with him punching the air with both hands.

Suki realized that she was staring. That form had been beautiful— _he_ had been beautiful performing it. As the realization hit her her face flushed, and she fled the training grounds with a hastily mumbled farewell.

 _No_ , she told herself firmly as she lay in bed the next morning after the end of her shift. _No, no, no, and no._ Zuko was the Fire Lord—more importantly, he was her _employer_. She wouldn't be able to do her job effectively if she let a distraction like this get the better of her. What's more, she was confused enough already—she didn't need _this_ to think about on top of everything else that was already on her mind.

 _So?_ another voice chimed in. _You're not one of his subjects; it shouldn't matter to you what station he is. You were comrades in arms well before you worked for him, and you weren't exactly planning to do this job for the rest of your life, now were you?_

_He probably doesn't even feel the same way._

That was, of course, the crux of the problem. With Sokka, it had been easy—she hadn't even thought it was possible to blush through so much face paint. Zuko, on the other hand, had been raised to politics—his smiles were muted, his expressions carefully controlled, and he knew how to hide his emotions when he really wanted to.

Even supposing he did return her feelings, what then? He was the Fire Lord, and she was a common guard—not to mention an Earth Kingdom native. If Suki had a lot on her mind right now, it was nothing in comparison to what Zuko was dealing with. He didn't need this kind of a distraction either. After thinking it over for a few days, Suki knew what she had to do.

"Suki?" Zuko frowned as he looked up from whatever paperwork he was currently doing—this wasn't their usual meeting time. "Is something wrong?"

She took a deep breath. Though she'd rehearsed this moment, actually _doing_ it was something else entirely—once the words were out, she would not be able to take them back. "Actually, I'm here to give you my resignation."

He froze in mid-motion, the brush in his hand dripping ink onto the parchment. "You're quitting?"

"Yes." Contrary to her expectations, it was easier to keep going now that she had started. "I'll stay on for another month—that ought to be plenty of time to find a replacement and to make sure she has the training she needs. I've even got a few promising candidates I could name if you're interested. After that, though…" There was no need for her to finish.

"I see." Glancing down at the parchment in front of him, Zuko saw the steadily growing blotch of ink, shook himself, and carefully replaced the brush before pushing the scroll to the side. "Can I ask why?" Then: "Is it something to do with me?"

"I… well, that's a bit complicated." Though she didn't want to share the details if she didn't have to, neither was Suki going to lie—she owed him better than that. "It's not because you've been bad to work for. It's just… there are a lot of things happening in my life right now, and I need to move on."

"Of course. That's completely understandable." With a shake of his head, Zuko gestured for her to sit. "I—" He paused, appeared to think for a few seconds, took a deep breath, and continued. "I realize I've been acting somewhat selfishly lately. All the while I've been taking advantage of your willingness to help me with my problems, but it never occurred to me that you might have some of your own."

"You weren't taking advantage. I wanted to help." Before she'd even consciously realized she was doing it, Suki had reached across the desk to lay her hand atop his.

Zuko froze. So did Suki, staring at her hand as though it wasn't a part of her body, but rather some stranger's appendage. Her cheeks were growing warmer by the second, and she knew that without her makeup ( _why_ hadn't she worn her makeup today?), the blush would be visible for all to see.

"I'm sorry." Her whole arm jerked as she pulled her hand away. "I shouldn't—"

"Suki." Before she could withdraw fully, he had moved to rest his own hand atop her wrist. His touch was light, and she could have broken away with ease, but nevertheless it held her far more effectively than if he had been gripping her with his full strength. "When you said it was complicated…?"

Heart now pounding against her ribcage, she gave a small nod. Was he saying what she thought he was saying…?

"I… have a confession to make." Zuko's fingers tightened ever so slightly around her hand. "I didn't just ask you to meet with me because I needed your help. You've been a great help, of course," he added hastily, "but I also wanted to spend time with you. At some point I realized that… well…"

As he also stumbled on what he wanted to say, Suki knew that they'd reached the point where talking would get them nowhere. She had never been one to wait around for something she wanted to come to her; she would either work for it, or accept that it was out of her reach. Now that she knew he felt the same way, which option to take was abundantly clear.

While Zuko continued to stammer, Suki stood, grabbed two fistfuls of his clothing, dragged him forward, and kissed him over the desk.

**Author's Note:**

> Longer chapter, because this relationship required much more development than the other two. Kataang is obviously canon, and I had Toph's obvious crush on Sokka to build from, but this one had almost no canon basis. Thus it was also the most difficult and stubborn chapter I've written thus far, and I had to drag it out of myself line by line, and… what did I just get myself into?
> 
> …it's only going to get worse from here on out, isn't it? *headdesk*


End file.
